Lounging onstage at a roast, Lisa Lampanelli laughs at criticism. But when a doctor said, “You don’t see a lot of 70-year-olds weighing what you weigh,” She listened and underwent stomach-reduction surgery to help shed 107 pounds.
“I want to live til I’m 95, I got a lot to do. Thankfully, it worked,” Lampanelli says. “I struggled with my weight from age 18-50, but now all the work of keeping it off is more work than struggling with it. But it’s good because I’ll live a lot longer and self-hate a lot less.”
In her two decades of performing, the brazen blonde has made insult comedy an artform, savaging every subsection of humanity—deploying equal-opportunity barbs that are laced with noble intentions.
“I think the whole audience feels equal at the end of show,” she says. “The white people feel no different from the black people. The straight-eys feel no better than the gays. You’re all equal to me, and I’m equal to you, so let’s just take it down a notch. We’re all the same.”
In the 2000s, “The Queen of Mean” established herself on the Comedy Central celebrity roasts of well-moneyed has-beens ranging from Flava Flav to Larry the Cable Guy. She excel not only due to her vicious disses but also her elephantine thick-skin, cackling as comedians jabbed at her weight and interracial hookups in front of full auditoriums and cameras broadcasting to millions watching at home.
“If it’s a funny joke, you’re just so happy that someone mentions you in a funny way,” she says. “If a joke stinks and it’s mean, I’m smart enough to go, ‘Okay Lisa, pretend to laugh because you’ll look like a dummy if you don’t.’ We’ve all seen those comics that act mad at jokes, and it’s like, ‘C’mon, you douche, you know why you’re here.’”
The most currently relevant of Lampanelli’s roastees is the cloud-coiffed unfiltered presidential hopeful, Donald Trump. The bombastic mogul gave Lampanelli a spot on his reality competition, “The Apprentice,” but Lampanelli wouldn’t trust her old boss with the nuclear codes.
“He loves attention. He’s a frustrated performer,” she says. “But he also does charity work with me for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and you can’t name a better charity, so I feel awful (saying this) but I think everyone would move to Vancouver if he becomes president. I really see the country emptying out. Let’s just pray that he goes back to being a businessman.”
On “The Apprentice,” Lampanelli finished fourth and won $130,000 for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, but sort of lost her mind, tearfully feuding with co-stars like Lou Ferrigno and Arsenio Hall while shooting for 20 hours a day.
“I used to be such a mental case, just screaming at people,” she says. “Menopause, plus my age, plus the emotional trauma of being in a marriage that wasn’t working, plus being surrounded by some real idiots, I just became a 100% battle axe. I can’t even describe how much work it was, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
Now, she regrets her outbursts and stopped yelling at people about a year ago. She also lopped off her long blonde locks, shaping her hair into an asymmetrical cut that she wears either combed over, dyed or spiked like a cockatoo. Then, Lampanelli went through a trying time when she got divorced right before her father’s death. She had to adjust to being single while mourning and endured without her former go-to comfort of compulsive eating. Her stomach can only handle about “a couple cups of food a day,”
“I actually have to feel things now, it really pisses me off,” she says. “My dad died and I had to grieve and I had to face it, and it sucked. But whenever you eat or drink or shop or do whatever to put off that feeling, it eventually backs up on you, and you gotta feel it. This way it’s just more direct.”
Though her machine-gun pace remains, Lampanelli’s weight loss, divorce, and grieving for her father has been kneaded into her act. After becoming a household name, she’s revealing more about her personal life and hoping her audience will empathize.
“I like to tell stories, but I like a lot of punchlines. I don’t like those drony comics. I don’t want one pay-off a minute, I want one every three seconds.” she says. “But now the audience gets to know me more. We all do the same crap. We all make the same dumb mistakes in our habits. (My act) still does what the insult comedy did: connects the audience with each other and me, and also equalizes everybody.”
At the age of 54, she has begun to transition away from stand-up, focusing on broader projects like writing a Vagina Monologues type play centering around four different women and their body image struggles, delivering therapeutic messages after sugary spoonfuls of honest humor.
“I cannot wait to never perform again,” she says. “The only thing performing is to me is a really fun job. It doesn’t make me feel better or worse. I don’t want to be that old ass bitch who’s bitter and trying to scare up 20 tickets and can’t do it. Thank god it’s not there yet, but if it does happen, I’m prepared.”
.Lisa Lampanelli Coming To Redwood City
